Google Apps Services Were Down (opens in new tab)

Getting the same message. However, this is happening to some of my logins only. Same with e-mails, some of them are working fine and some of them are timing out or asking for passwords. For a second I thought someone hacked my e-mail. :>

That error message seems to just be Google's default 500 error message page; even when it is an API request that fails, even if the API is specified to return errors as some kind of JSON or XML, you get that HTML page in response. (I know this as Google's OpenID+OAuth pipeline has been failing occassionally for the last month, something I've been trying to get them to fix on the Google Federated Login API mailing list.)

so many developers hacking on google glass apps?

Your only copy of your customers, is in a third party reseller control panel?

The phone calls from my clients have started to come in already...!

There are API endpoints for that. Not sure if they're affected.

Now it is showing Service disruption for Admin control panel / API

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1...

Odd, "Admin control panel/API" is marked as disrupted for me.

NXDOMAIN wouldn't be server down, that's no DNS record. Still won't work, but different (much bigger) issue.

try `nslookup -querytype=MX google.com`

smtp.googlemail.com also failing

(edit: intermittently)

Crazy – my IMAP client (Apple Mail) has no problem until it tries to send via SMTP… when it chokes.

Also, no working gmail for all my accounts except my @gmail.com address – at least fail consistently, you Googlers. Blech!

Search is (mostly) stateless. They can copy the search database to hundreds of DCs around the world, and each can operate independently - so if one of them has a problem, it's not likely to affect the others (unless it's bad data, but that's why you shouldn't deploy index updates to all DCs simultaneously). There's some personalization, sure, but you can just fall back to non-personalized search if that breaks.

Things like gmail, on the other hand, are inherently stateful. When you log into gmail, you have to eventually connect to one system that maintains your mailbox. Sure, there might be replication - but the replicas are all talking to each other. It's surprisingly easy to have a cascade failure in a system like this, where one of the replicas going down triggers (directly or indirectly) all the others failing as well. Or you can have some bad data that gets replicated out, and then proceeds to confuse everything that's looking at it - unlike search, you have to replicate that data immediately, and don't get to enjoy the benefits of a staged deployment.

This also explains why not all users were affected - I'd guess that their system is divided into some number of shards, and users are assigned to a particular shard. That 0.07% of users affected probably represents a single unhealthy shard.

Contributing the vast majority of revenue for the company has something to do with it.

Huffington Post reports that Gmail also went offline on April 29th of 2010.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/gmail-down-check-gm...

Google reports that Gmail also went offline on April 24th of 2009.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/current-gmail-outage....

(Sadly, the partial Gmail outage of 2011 seemed to be February 27th, or this would be an epic pattern of "don't trust Gmail during the end of April" ;P.)

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Google-...

There is a massively linked Boston bomber Google Docs spreadsheet making the rounds -- the last time a viral Google doc saw that sort of exposure, the service went down.

Tried this -- didn't work for me unfortunately.

Same here. Intermittent though. I'm like 2 for 5.